This year’s Fiction Contest judge is the award-winning novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist, Heather O'Neill. Her novels Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, have been shortlisted for the Governor...
Can’t wait to get your hands on ROOM 46.1 Around the Table: Asian Voices? Neither can we. Dive into an exclusive sneak peek of the issue with “Such Good Girls” by K. Quyen Pham.
Our 2022 Short Forms Contest is judged by Alix Ohlin! Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, mostly recently the novel Dual Citizens and the story collection We Want What We Want. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other...
“Transcendent Expectation” is the Third Place winner for Room’s 2022 Fiction Contest. Of this piece, judge Shashi Bhat writes: "Transcendent Expectation is a story about a modest prayer on a family road trip, felt deeply by its young protagonist. This piece is...
The judge for Room’s 2022 Fiction Contest is Shashi Bhat! Shashi Bhat is the author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth (McClelland & Stewart, Canada, Fall 2021; Grand Central Publishing, US, Spring 2022) and a short story collection forthcoming from...
Five writers have made our 2021 Fiction Contest Shortlist. A big thank you to our esteemed judge, Jenny Heijun Wills, for her careful consideration, and congrats to these talented writers! We Climbed Up Glaciers, by Rayne Weinstein Love with Responsibility, by...
“Good Friends We Have” is the honourable mention for Room’s Fiction Contest 2020. My grandmother said, you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, so choose wisely. But I didn’t so much choose my friends as they chose me. At school, we clung...
“Pieces of Me” is the honourable mention of Room’s 2019 Fiction Contest as selected by judge Catherine Hernandez. I woke up one morning to bigger breasts. I’m not talking triangle pointies from puberty (which hit well over a decade ago), a few extra pounds from the...
“Baby Food” is the honourable mention of Room’s Short Forms Contest 2018 as selected by judge Hiromi Goto. We called it baby food. We were secretive and gleeful. At fourteen, we’d outrun our periods—literally—clomping down Kimberly Hill with such exaggerated...
“They Comes On the Ice” is the honourable mention of Room’s Poetry and Fiction Contest 2018 as selected by judge Zoe Whittall. The day I arrived on Fogo Island there was a polar bear loose in Joe Batt’s Arm. I had driven from St. Johns to Gander, caught the ferry from...